Delegation in Management: Trusting Your People to Perform at High Levels of Responsibility

Many business people even when they don’t show it find it difficult to trust big amounts of work responsibility to their employees. They fear something might go terribly wrong if they let the junior staff be in control. And so the customer care attendant is given no responsibility or directives to replace a bad product for a complaining customer without first sending a report up to management and then telling the already frustrated customer to call back next week.

If your people realize you do not trust them to deliver a decent job on their own then they’ll most certainly fail to do that. Your employees like most people will want to be credited as mature and calculated enough to oversee certain duties.

Being scared of leaving seemingly important tasks to employees is something that stems from perfectionist tendencies. You as the manager or director feel you are the best hand to do such duties and get them accurately done. But you may be wrong.

Unless you are running a sole proprietorship you will need to delegate more and more duties to people under you to make you really face the fundamentals that will keep your fine little organization running as smooth as possible. What then are the most essential things a CEO/Owner/Manager should be doing most of the time?

Years ago while furiously studying and lapping up any good idea or information about business and management that I could find I came across some lines of business advice that I have never allowed myself to lose sight of. The wisdom in those words was as profound as it was simple and I knew that keeping to them will make the work of any business CEO easier and more achievement oriented.

Three things Every CEO/Business Owner/Manager Should Spend Most of His Time Doing

1) Refining Systems: Systems keep and sustain your business model in auto-run. Systems are and should be a healthy combination of human and material management. Setting a business organization to become a near perfect system has always been a fascination for me. It demands that you set up things to run effectively even with you out of the way. It doesn’t render you useless to the firm but a robust and effective system makes you the head planner, gives you a bit more precious time to follow up on other little important issues like family for example.

Making your business system run is a topic for another day but let it be clear that refining your systems is one of the three most vital things you should be doing as a business person. Arrange personnel, automate processes that can be automated without rubbing off badly on your customers, set defined tasks and duties for your people, monitor, adjust, monitor and keep it going.

2) Creating More Revenue and Profit Increase: I wanted to write ‘Sales and Revenue’ but remembered that sales may not be totally the right word here. Revenues, because you will need to look at the total money coming in which sales might not cover depending on your business. Profits, because no matter what type of business you do profits is universally understandable. If you don’t pay attention to your profit line you’ll soon be paying attention to creditors. Your overall work should be setting revenue and profit goals (these two do not by any means go hand in hand), establishing strategies to meet the goals and reviewing work done in reaching the set goals or not. Your time shouldn’t be spent in any other petty matters that your people can easily handle.

3) Keeping Your People Happy and Committed: To many, the first two might come a bit easier than the third. It is always one of the most daunting tasks to keep a bunch of different moods and egos happy working for your organization but that is what you must have to keep finding a way to do. Most consultants advise; Give your staff challenging targets to achieve, give them tools that are required, appraise their performance and reward them when targets are met. I wish things were as easy as that. Alas, most times they are way more complicated than the above advice suggests.

These are the most significant and important tasks and duties you should be fully immersed in as a business person. Any other thing except these three may as well be time wasting and time consuming. Even in these listed tasks you will need the best employees to help you and you will need also to let them have reasonable levels of responsibility to prove themselves capable.

The Importance of Challenges and Dynamic Work Environment

Work Environments that are dynamic attract power packed individuals. Such environments create excitement and fun. Workers enjoy their work. Monotonous duty is reduced to the barest minimum. Challenges contribute a great deal to dynamic work environments and make people look eager to prove themselves. The workplace should continually bring out the best from your people and should not be a place for them to withdraw into their cocoons and literally dry up. This is not rhetoric but things that should be looked into seriously by any forward looking business person

Paul Eze is an entrepreneur, business strategist and writer. Read his Business and Personal Success Blog